As I consider formative and summative assessments online for the LEC course I’m taking, I realize that most students will take these assessments without the the teacher there. That means a teacher needs to be prepared for the student to use outside resources to support. Is there anything wrong with this?

Well, I guess it depends on what you expect from the students. If you’re simply looking for the students to regurgitate facts, yes, it’s a problem. But honestly, is that what we’re looking for? We should be looking for production as well as collaboration.

In my work this week for my LEC course, I was asked to create an assessment for my students. To this end, I created a three-part assessment:

1) Creating a poem based on this image (VoiceThread). Because I chose the image myself, I can more effectively know that students aren’t just taking a poem from somewhere else and pasting it in, as it wouldn’t apply to the photo.

2) I took this poem from a student last year and asked for supportive commentary. This way, I can judge what they already have learned about poetry in the past two years of school.

3) I posted a poem with hopefully very few difficult words for students to read (VoiceThread). This is simply to gauge their poet’s voice and see if they can perform a poem. It also gives them an idea for their own poems, if they haven’t read/heard others before.

If I used these as pre- and post-assessments, I would expect the poems to use more descriptive language the second time around, give more targeted feedback, and will have a much more interesting read of the poem. Much better than asking for a poem using alliteration, where the student could simply do a Google search for alliteration poems.